Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

Outside of Ybor, Tampa was strictly white. Dion showed him a few places above Twenty-fourth Street with wooden signs stating their position on the matter. A grocery store on Nineteenth Avenue wanted it known that NO DOGS OR LATINS were allowed and a druggist on Columbus had a NO LATINS on the left side of his door and NO DAGOS on the right.

Joe looked at Dion. “You all right with that?”

“Of course not, but what’re you going to do?”

Joe took a hit off Dion’s flask and passed it back to him. “Gotta be some rocks around here.”

It had started to rain, which did nothing to cool things off. Down here, rain felt like more sweat. It was close to midnight, and things just seemed hotter, the humidity a woolen embrace around everything you did. Joe got into the driver’s seat and kept the engine idling while Dion shattered both of the druggist windows and then hopped into the car and they drove back into Ybor. Dion explained that the Italians lived around here, in the higher-numbered streets between Fifteenth and Twenty-third. The lighter spics were between Tenth and Fifteenth, the nigger spics below Tenth Street and west of Twelfth Avenue, where most of the cigar factories were.

They found a joint down there at the end of an almost-road that went past the Vayo Cigar Factory and vanished into a cowl of mangrove and cypress. It was nothing more than a shotgun shack on stilts overlooking a swamp. They’d strung netting from the trees along the banks, and the netting covered the shack and the cheap wood tables beside it and the porch out back.

They played some music in there. Joe had never heard anything quite like it—Cuban rumba, he guessed, but brassier and more dangerous, and the people on the dance floor were doing something that looked far more like fucking than dancing. Most everyone in there was colored—some American black, mostly Cuban black, though—and those who were merely brown didn’t have the Indian features of the highborn Cubans or the Spaniards. Their faces were rounder, their hair more wiry. Half the people knew Dion. The bartender, an older woman, gave him a jug of rum and two glasses without him asking.

“You the new boss?” she asked Joe.

“I guess I am,” Joe said. “I’m Joe. And you are?”

“Phyllis.” She slipped a dry hand into his. “This is my place.”

“It’s nice. What’s it called?”

“Phyllis’s Place.”

“Of course.”

“What do you think of him?” Dion asked Phyllis.

“He too pretty,” she said and looked at Joe. “Someone need to mess you up.”

“We’ll get to work on that.”

“See you do,” she said and went to serve another customer.

They took the bottle out onto the back porch and set it on a small table and took residence in two rocking chairs. They looked out through the netting at the swamp as the rain stopped falling and the dragonflies returned. Joe heard something heavy moving through the brush. And something else, just as heavy, moved underneath the porch.

“Reptiles,” Dion said.

Joe lifted his feet off the porch. “What?”

“Alligators,” Dion repeated.

“You’re pulling my leg.”

“No,” Dion said, “but they will.”

Joe raised his knees higher. “What the fuck are we doing in a place with alligators?”

Dion shrugged. “You can’t escape ’em down here. They’re everywhere. You see water, there’s ten of ’em in there, big eyes watching.” He wiggled his fingers and bugged his eyes. “Waiting for dumb Yankees to come take a dip.”

Joe heard the one below him slither away and then crash through the mangrove again. He didn’t know what to say.

Dion chuckled. “Just don’t go in the water.”

“Or near it,” Joe said.

“That too.”

They sat on the porch and drank and the last of the rain clouds drifted off. The moon returned and Joe could see Dion as clearly as if they were inside. He found his old friend staring at him, so he stared back. For quite a while, neither of them said a word, but Joe felt a whole conversation pass between them nonetheless. He was relieved, and he knew Dion was too, to finally get on with it.

Dion took a swig of the rotgut rum, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “How’d you know it was me?”

Joe said, “Because I knew it wasn’t me.”

“Could’ve been my brother.”

“May he rest in peace,” Joe said, “but your brother wasn’t smart enough to double-cross a street.”

Dion nodded and looked down at his shoes for a bit. “It’d be a blessing.”

“What’s that?”

“Dying.” Dion looked at him. “I got my brother killed, Joe. You know what living with that’s like?”

“I have some idea.”

“How could you?”

“Trust me,” Joe said. “I do.”

“He was older than me by two years,” Dion said, “but I was the older brother, get me? I was supposed to look out for him. ’Member when we all first started palling around, knocking over newsstands, Paolo and me had that other little brother, called him Seppi?”

Joe nodded. Funny, he hadn’t thought of the kid in years. “Got the polio.”

Dion nodded. “Died, he was eight? My mother was never right again after that. I said to Paolo at the time, you know, we couldn’t do nothing to save Seppi; that was just God and God gets his way. But each other?” He twisted his thumbs together, raised his fists to his lips. “We would protect each other.”

Behind them the shack thumped with bodies and bass. In front of them mosquitoes rose off the swamp like claps of dust and found the moonlight.

“So what now? You requested me from prison. You had them find me in Montreal and pull me all the way down here, give me a good living. And for what?”

“Why’d you do it?” Joe asked.

“Because he asked me to.”

“Albert?” Joe whispered.

“Who else?”

Joe closed his eyes for a moment. He reminded himself to breathe slowly. “He asked you to rat us all out?”

“Yeah.”

“He pay you?”

“Fuck no. He offered, but I wouldn’t take his fucking money. Fuck him.”

“You still work for him?”

“No.”

“Why would you tell the truth, D?”

Dion removed a switchblade from his boot. He placed it on the small table between them and followed it with two .38 long-barrels and one .32 snub-nose. He added a lead sap and brass knuckles, then wiped his hands clean of them and showed his palms to Joe.

“After I’m gone,” he said, “ask around Ybor about a guy named Brucie Blum. You’ll see him down around Sixth Avenue sometimes. He walks funny, talks funny, has no idea he used to be big noise. He used to work for Albert. Just six months ago. Big hit with the ladies, had himself some nice suits. Now he shuffles around with a cup, begging for change, pisses himself, can’t tie his own fucking shoes. Last thing he did when he was still big noise? He come up to me in a blind pig over on Palm? He says, ‘Albert needs to talk to you. Or else, see.’ So I chose ‘or else’ and beat his fucking head in. So, no, I don’t work for Albert no more. It was a onetime job. Just ask Brucie Blum.”

Joe sipped the awful rum and said nothing.

“You going to do it yourself or get someone else to do it?”

Joe met his eyes. “I’ll kill you myself.”

“Okay.”

“If I kill you.”

“I’d appreciate you make up your mind about it, one way or the other.”

“Don’t much give a shit what you’d appreciate, D.”

Now it was Dion’s time to be silent. The thumps and the bass grew softer behind them. More and more cars left the grounds and headed back up the mud path toward the cigar factory.

“My father’s gone,” Joe said eventually. “Emma’s dead. Your brother’s dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you’re one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?”